PT - JOURNAL ARTICLE AU - Abhinav Nellore AU - Christopher Wilks AU - Kasper D Hansen AU - Jeffrey T Leek AU - Ben Langmead TI - Rail-dbGaP: analyzing dbGaP-protected data in the cloud with Amazon Elastic MapReduce AID - 10.1101/035287 DP - 2016 Jan 01 TA - bioRxiv PG - 035287 4099 - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/03/05/035287.short 4100 - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/03/05/035287.full AB - Motivation: Public archives contain thousands of trillions of bases of valuable sequencing data. More than 40% of the Sequence Read Archive is human data protected by provisions such as dbGaP To analyze dbGaP-protected data, researchers must typically work with IT administrators and signing officials to ensure all levels of security are implemented at their institution. This is a major obstacle, impeding reproducibility and reducing the utility of archived data.Results: We present a protocol and software tool for analyzing protected data in a commercial cloud. The protocol, Rail-dbGaP, is applicable to any tool running on Amazon Web Services Elastic MapReduce. The tool, Rail-RNA v0.2, is a spliced aligner for RNA- seq data, which we demonstrate by running on 9,662 samples from the dbGaP-protected GTEx consortium dataset. The Rail-dbGaP protocol makes explicit for the first time the steps an investigator must take to develop Elastic MapReduce pipelines that analyze dbGaP-protected data in a manner compliant with NIH guidelines. Rail-RNA automates implementation of the protocol, making it easy for typical biomedical investigators to study protected RNA-seq data, regardless of their local IT resources or expertise.Availability: Rail-RNA is available from http://rail.bio. Technical details on the Rail-dbGaP protocol as well as an implementation walkthrough are available at https://github.com/nellore/rail-dbgap. Detailed instructions on running Rail-RNA on dbGaP-protected data using Amazon Web Services are available at http://docs.rail.bio/dbgap/.Contact: anellore{at}gmail.com, langmea{at}cs.jhu.edu